All eyes are focused today on southern Sudan, where a vote begins that most expect will create Africa’s newest country — and, it turns out, probably peacefully. There’s lots of good analysis around the web on that surprise.
But it’s not just the folks in southern Sudan who are voting; it’s the diaspora, too — or was supposed to be. Journalist Katrina Manson, in Juba, looks at low registration numbers — IOM calls it a “boycott” of the election — in cities around the world.
On my own (former) turf, Jake Naughton of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting talks to Sudanese in Washington, who see the vote as a new era of hope.
If you live in a city with a southern Sudanese diaspora, I’d love to hear what the mood is like there — from people you talk to, what your local press is writing, etc. Please leave comments.
Update: Here’s some tweets from Kim Yi Dionne, a professor at Texas A&M, on the diaspora voting in Dallas.
And if you’re looking to follow the vote, you can’t do better for a correspondent than Rebecca Hamilton, the Washington Post’s special Sudan correspondent and the author of Fighting for Darfur which comes out in February, who’s been coming and going from the region since before most of us ever heard of it. She’s also got a series of dispatches flowing through The New Republic. Follow her or the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which funds her work. (I think the best Pulitzer updates come from Nathalie Applewhite.)
(And on RSS feeds, sorry to my own followers for the double posting. Hit a WordPress glitch.)
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